William Pfaff is the author of The Irony of Manifest Destiny, published in June 2010 by Walker and Company (New York) -- his tenth and culminating work on international politics and the American destiny.He describes the neglected sources and unforeseen consequences of the tragedy towards which the nation's current effort to remake the world to fit America's measure is leading.His previous books and his articles in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and his syndicated newspaper column, featured for a quarter century in the globally read International Herald Tribune, have made him one of America's most respected and internationally influential interpreters of world affairs.[Read more...]

His books : BARBARIAN SENTIMENTS: America in the New Century, Hill and Wang, New York 2000.

on 2000/1/7 0:00:00 (20549 reads)

This second and revised edition of the 1989 American National Book Award finalist and 1990 Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau laureate, Barbarian Sentiments, contains the full original text together with the author’s decade-after appraisal of what he wrote in each chapter, where he was right and where he was wrong. Includes a new Foreward, together with a 48-page “Afterword in the New Century.”

When the original edition of this book was published, a critic called it “an iconoclastic, coruscating examination of America’s predicament at a time when international affairs are escaping the conventions of American public debate and the old categories (and pieties) of American foreign policy.” It proved a prescient anticipation of the impending crisis of Communism, even though when it was written the Berlin Wall had not been breached, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were still intact, and the United States was respected as leader of the free world.

In this greatly augmented new edition, Pfaff explored the disquieting elements he discerned in the United States a decade later: a drift towards unrealistic assumptions about America’s ‘benevolent’ domination of international affairs, an obsession with ‘rogue states’ and terrorism – even though the principal global forces remained civilian, economic and political.

“Both a penetrating critique of the conventional American outlook and a prescient survey of the major forces shaping the current international scene. If public officials had time to read books, this is one of those books that every official ought to read.” -- Larry Tool, San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle Book Review

Buy this book through English-language bookstores everywhere, or from on-line booksellers.